HE
composer Carter Burwell was sitting next to his friends, the filmmakers
Joel and Ethan Coen and the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, in the
soundproofed studio of his TriBeCa apartment. Their chairs occupied a
narrow aisle of floor, skirting the massive mixing console of switches,
audio signals and recording devices.

"I brought you guys all
together to apologize for not having written the music yet," Mr.
Burwell joked. "It will be done very soon, and I hope you will all like
it very much. Do you have any questions?"

The music under
discussion was the score for two original one-act plays, one by the
Coens, the other by Mr. Kaufman. They call them "sound plays"; intended
for radio, they will get their first performances April 28 through 30
at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn. The cast includes Marcia Gay
Harden, Steve Buscemi, Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Hope Davis
and John Goodman. When the evening at St. Ann's, "Theater of the New
Ear," was announced on March 3, all three shows sold out within a week.
The play will also be performed at the Royal Festival Hall in London on
May 13, and broadcast across America this summer on Sirius Satellite
Radio.

But only, that is, if Mr. Burwell finishes it. "I'm writing it as we speak," he admitted, a month before opening night.

Of course, Mr. Burwell is a pro, having composed scores for "Fargo,"
"Adaptation," and many more films involving the Coens and Mr. Kaufman.
Still, as he said, "I thought it'd be just like writing music for a
film, that in the absence of visuals, I could really pack the auditory
realm with sound." Instead, he continued, "You're so dependent on the
sound of the voices that it's very easy for the music to seem
intrusive."

Also there's no post-production mixing and editing
in the studio, as with film. Everything has to come together onstage,
in real time - and with perilously little in the way of rehearsal,
since the stars plan to descend en masse on New York just one week
before opening night. "We've grabbed people that we know and asked them
to come in and perform this essentially as a favor," Ethan Coen
explained.

The project arose when an acquaintance of Mr.
Burwell's asked him last spring if he would consider performing his
film scores at Royal Festival Hall. "I told him I wasn't that
interested, but that if the situation involved new music, that would be
good," Mr. Burwell recalled. He proposed calling his film-world friends
and trawling for stray script pages to set to music.

The first
call Mr. Burwell made was to the Coens: "I called and asked if they
might have a scene sitting around." Instead, they offered to write a
sound play from scratch. Mr. Burwell then called Mr. Kaufman to see if
he could fill out the evening with a second and was "amazed that he
said yes."

Mr. Kaufman remembered it slightly differently. "I
hemmed and hawed, and said I was interested, but I didn't commit," he
said. "I was writing something else at the time, and wasn't getting
anywhere, and I thought, sometimes it helps me if I have two things to
work on at once. And Carter kind of bullied me."

"I didn't bully him," Mr. Burwell laughed. "Well, some."

The
Coen brothers' play, "Sawbones," is about the star of a television
series about a frontier veterinarian (Mr. Hoffman). The play by Mr.
Kaufman, whose plots are famously convoluted, is somewhat harder to
describe.

"It begins in a theater, and the very first sounds
you hear are the band tuning up," Mr. Burwell explained. "And there's
Muzak, because there's a play within the play that takes place within
an elevator."

Mr. Burwell played a section of his music from a
draft of "Sawbones," set to a rough recording of the actors in an early
rehearsal.

A simple piano tune filled the studio. Voices emerged over the chords.

A woman: "Exterminators, meter readers and Jehovah's Witnesses."

A man: "And that is love. Love is constant."

A man: "Goodbye, Sawbones."

Another man: "Adios, Seņor Sawbones."

And as a woman said gravely, "I am ready for your love, Dale," strings rose above the piano melody in an elegiac swell.

Joel
Coen listened thoughtfully. "Isn't that one place where we simplified
and cut it down since the reading?" he asked his brother.

Ethan Coen smiled amiably. "None of us has done this before," he said, "and we don't t have a clue."